


Open Hand or Closed Fist

by unheroics



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 18:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12041970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: Meagan tries to quantify her relationship with Emily Kaldwin, without much hope for success. For one thing it would require Meagan to be an actual person, and not a costume that Billie Lurk had put on when her own reflection in the mirror became too awful to look at.





	Open Hand or Closed Fist

The Dreadful Wale sang itself to sleep with lilting, creaking monotony of settling machine parts and bending hull. It was an old trawler, older than Meagan, and its age made itself known to the senses: the plating of its bulkheads had the look of metal one layer of rust away from crumbling; sluggish at times, it moaned to itself, contracting steel and water pressure; and it smelled of old cargo. Live cargo.

It was not so large that one might hunt whales in it — and Meagan was glad of it, even with years between her and the quivering mass of abused flesh that was the whale she’d seen at a slaughterhouse halfway across the Empire — but death still lingered aboard, animal death. Cruel death. Meagan found scales, sometimes, in strange places, but refused to think her ship haunted.

She’d got it off a reformed smuggler in Yaro. The smuggler still owed Meagan half a favour, after the lengths to which Meagan had gone, ascertaining that the woman would have uneventful passage from Tyvia to Gristol. Her old contacts had bribed the customs Watch officers to look the other way, and in return she’d been gifted the Wale, at the time named after a Tyvian noblewoman of ill repute.

As a girl Meagan had dreamed of being captain of her own ship. Running through the slums of the city of her birth, throwing rocks into the brackish, toxic sludge of the Wrenhaven, she and Deirdre had spun tales of the adventures they would one day pursue. But, of course, Deirdre had died a violent death and there’d been no more tales to spin. Not the kind that could ever be shared.

And there she was, at the end of it all, no richer or smarter than the girl who had stalked death himself until death had taken notice, then taken her in.

Her cabin was barely more than a badly lit cubby hole, with an oil lamp that swayed in time with the Wale, both subject to the pitch and roll of waves. She’d placed the audiograph inside a chest, like a shameful or a corpse that had yet to start smelling rotten; the wanted posters, letters, all but books were consigned to the drawers and locked. Not a great show, in terms of trust, frankly; but trust was not what she had been asked for, nor what she had offered.

The cot was narrow, too narrow by far to comfortably suit two grown women, and as Meagan sighed the body next to hers shifted, very slightly, seeking comfort or warmth before remembering that neither would be forthcoming.

“Even the floor would be better than this.” Emily’s voice came muffled, where she had her face pressed into Meagan’s lone pillow. They’d done this enough times since Emily’s excursion into Stilton’s mansion that Meagan knew this about her: she hoarded bedclothes.

“Be my guest.”

With an ungainly snort, unbefitting a lady and even less a monarch, Emily lifted herself on her elbows, then sat up. It made the cot seem more cramped, and Meagan moved to accommodate her; the motion sent a faint itching sensation, pins and needles, running through her right arm until she felt her fingertips smart with it. Sometimes it felt that her right arm didn’t work quite right; not quite.

She watched Emily flex her shoulders, the muscle and bones moving in her naked back, skin stretched over ribs and spine. All so discordantly fragile, for someone who had escaped from Dunwall Tower armed with a pistol and sword, so deadly even discounting the Outsider’s mark that Meagan could feel calling to her like a lover’s drowned lament, like to like, her own bond to the Void long faded. In the low oil-light of the cabin, Emily’s complexion seemed only pale, without the translucent sheen like that of polluted river creatures, or a sheltered princess; and in the weeks she’d spent in Karnaca, the sun had been unforgiving. Her body was far from the curves and gentle slopes of a Gristolian beauty ideal: she was sharp inside and out, the kind of woman who could be called handsome for the sake of politeness.

Her hair was unbound, slithering down her back between the shoulder blades until Emily coiled it about one hand, twisting it into a tight knot that dropped down her front, where Meagan couldn’t see.

How would Emily have grown up, had her mother not been murdered? She would still have been severe rather than beautiful, but perhaps the set of her mouth wouldn’t have been quite so disapproving, the shadows beneath her eyes quite so deep. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been as whipcord-muscled, a trained fighter when she could have had so many to win those fights for her.

In moments of unbearable pity for herself Meagan wondered if Emily would have been as well prepared to battle Delilah without that unique experience: her mother falling, her world tilting on its axis and righting itself wrong and awful and unchangeably cruel. Once the pity passed, Meagan struggled to maintain the illusion of herself, of the person she pretended — wanted — to be. Meagan Foster, born of the sea, bound one day to return into its killing depths. Meagan Foster, whose hands were clean.

The false skin worn by a twice-traitor.

“There are so many things I wish I could take back,” Emily said, an eerie echo of the tone of Meagan’s own thoughts. “Turn back time and start over, make all the different choices. Maybe then —”

“Everyone has things they regret.” It might have been Billie Lurk speaking. She had thought, once, that a name was just a collection of sounds: abstract words with a tenuous connection to a living being. She knew better now. “Things they wish they could take back.”

“Not everyone’s mistakes plunge a whole country into anarchy,” said Emily. She bowed her head, a sudden motion that made her spine crack as if breaking under an unseen weight, and Meagan wished she could touch her without leaving a taint. Her skin had a faint gloss of sweat to it, a film of salt. “It infuriates me that I don’t know what she’s doing. What she’s doing to _my_ city. My father, and — Alexi —”

_Who’s Alexi?_ But Meagan didn’t ask.

Twisting her body as she’d twisted her hair, Emily turned and shifted and coiled, energy channelled into a kind of violence: she was on her hands and knees over Meagan, dark-eyed and more importantly dry-eyed, naked in the low light that seemed to shiver as it soaked in her unspent anger. The Void itself must have fed on her fury, her righteous, livid betrayal.

Delilah, of course, had that effect on people.

She hung like a spectre or an accusation between them, in spaces that only Meagan could see. She imagined Delilah watching them kiss, humming in approval as Meagan ran her hands over the expanse of available skin from Emily’s shoulder to breast to stomach to side, as if gentling a feral animal, returning to her chest to hear Emily make harsh but eager noises that the ship couldn’t, quite, swallow.

It took her a long time to feel anything but dread, for arousal to actually make itself known enough to ease the way for Emily’s hands, and Meagan would have gladly just given without taking, but Emily was not one to lie back and be attended. She coaxed the guilt out of Meagan with rigid patience, and then she took her over the edge, inexorable as the sea. Climax felt like suicide, but only the false skin died with it. Billie remained.

-

After her trip to Aramis Stilton’s mansion, Emily had looked at Meagan with a degree of bemusement, as if seeing someone different, catching the sight of a stranger in the corner of her vision. It had been an odd development, and Emily’s focus felt like a hook she had planted around Meagan’s entrails so that each look made Meagan’s stomach tighten. That regard, whatever had happened in Stilton’s mansion; Meagan still wasn’t sure how it had ended with Emily pushing her into her cabin then pushing her up against the bulkheads.

At about the same time Meagan had noticed an ache materialising sometimes in her right arm, the length of it from the elbow down, and a slight migraine blooming behind her right eye at other times. She paid neither much heed, not when Emily was wont to slink into her cabin and demand to be touched. Well; she usually demanded to be fucked, with an indecorous matter-of-factness that just spoke of her royal breeding. The only things Meagan found surprising about the ordeal were her own lack of surprise, and that once flat on her back, Emily would always go pliant like a dog petted just so, regal bearing and imperious temper gone as swiftly as let blood.

She did not remind Meagan of Deirdre. Meagan didn’t ask whether she reminded Emily of anyone back in Dunwall, or whether there was anyone in Dunwall for her to miss. The one time she had tried, Emily leaned back against the desk bolted to the deck — so close to the audiograph locked in a drawer — her fingers curled about its edge so tightly that the knuckles turned white and blue.

“Does it matter?” she had said. Her eyes were fixed on an unfixed point: memory. “Everything is different. If I — when I return to Dunwall, it’ll never be the same. Every day out here, I feel myself changing.”

Meagan’s gaze had drifted to her bound hand, where they both knew the Outsider’s mark lay, and neither spoke of it, as if silence could banish it from collective awareness. Here was the Empire’s rightful sovereign, branded a heretic for all to see if she were not careful.

Emily had looked, too, lifting her left hand to curl it into a loose fist. “No. It’ll never be the same.”

“Maybe you’ll feel better once you put a sword through Delilah’s face.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It could be. Not a lot of problems a good stabbing can’t fix,” Meagan had said, or Billie had said through her mouth, a wisp of the arrogant killer she wasn’t yet ready to admit she missed.

-

At times, she would wake to Emily already in her bunk, curled around her back or stretched out beside her with no regard for decorum or personal space. Her arm would fall across Meagan’s chest, or her hand would drift to her hair, or her body would align itself to accommodate the cramped space of Meagan’s sleeping quarters, thoughtlessly generous.

It was strange, that tacit acknowledgement of a kind of affection that Meagan would never expect from someone like Emily, with her upbringing, or personality. She exuded a coldness that wasn’t directional or personally targeted, nor conscious; she reminded Meagan of the sea, perhaps uncaring and uncomfortably larger than life but still enough to draw one in and keep them, change them, mould them to fit itself. Herself. A woman born to be obeyed.

What would this woman do if she were to know?

With Stilton found, with Hypatia freed from her demons, with Sokolov safe — everyone whose survival Emily pledged to ensure — a time would come for Meagan, for Billie, to test that generosity, strip herself of the falsehoods and bare her throat for the knife.

Tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow. For another scant few hours Billie Lurk could wear Meagan’s skin and pretend it was all she was, the costume, the painted-over mirror when her own true reflection was too ruined to be looked at without flinching. Soon enough Meagan would die, and shortly after Billie, perhaps, would as well. A third death, literal this time.

She twisted on her cot, careful not to tug at the moth-eaten blanket that Emily had annexed, leaving Billie to shiver in the Wale’s perpetual chill. Dawn would come and with it more killing. One step closer to Dunwall. Emily scowled even in her sleep, but the tight set of her brows loosened when Billie traced the bridge of Emily’s nose with the tip of her index finger, a useless sentimental gesture to which she would never confess.

Would she tell Emily about Delilah, about what she had done — and almost done — in the witch’s name? Even more than the Empress’ murder, Delilah was a wound never to be healed, festering with regret, betrayal poured over it like salt. Perhaps it would be enough to admit to one, omit the other.

Daud had once told her what he’d learned too late: all choices mattered. For a second time, Billie would place her life in the hands of the one she had betrayed.

History was recursive. She’d take her chances.


End file.
